COMMUNICATION SKILLS
We will be covering 6 areas of Communication as mentioned below, in 3 parts:

Part 1	Communicating Effectively
	Skills in Communicating (listening, understanding, handling in-person communication).
Part 2	Writing skills
	Giving instructions effectively
Part 3	The barriers in communication
	Effective meetings

Communicating Effectively
The proper language - The 'proper' language depends on the industry and the culture being nurtured in the organisation. Some aspects to 'think about' are:

• Choice of language depends on maturity of customers
• In situation of uncertainty use a universal language
• In worse case scenario, use body language or props

Here are some guidelines for appropriate speech and action:-

• To be aware of the circumstances of the interaction first
• To be aware of your dialogue – language choice, selection of words, length of explanation, tone of voice and gestures.
• Speech and action must be precise and suitable for the situation or occasion.

One of the reasons we say the wrong things is because of our failure to think actively i.e. to be alert. Instead we become 'robotic'.
Remember – A good customer service person is one who sees a customer in every individual and an individual in every customer.
Superiors should encourage involvement in the work, as opposed to becoming insensitive and robotic in the way customers are served.

The Usage of appropriate words and phrases
Appropriate is 'suitability' to circumstances/occasions and timing. Here are some guidelines in short phrases or a word on how you can use them in a effective manner:

• Genuineness
• Clarity of purpose
• Tagging of message
• Genuineness of speech and action
• Volume of speech
• Clarity of speech
• Modulation of tone suitable gestures
• Correct posture
• Effective smile
• Maintenance of eye contact
• Active listening

The professional image
The projection of professional 'image' is the product of approach, style and grooming. Let's look at 'approach' first. As a customer service personnel, it is important for us to be courteous in our approach. To be courteous is the act of being attentive, considerate, respectful, helpful and polite; in your 'words' and 'deeds'.In terms of grooming and deportment, your appearance must be presentable and professional. Here are some tips to guide and help you:

• Your attire must be complete neat and tidy
• Have a face that is clean
• A work area that is tidy and neat.
• Training and appropriate implementation of skills acquired
• Practice what you have learned
• Learn to observe and listen attentively
• Always evaluate and give feedback

Skills in Communicating (Listening, Understanding, Handling in-person communications)

Listening – In a small or big way almost everyone needs to sell something to someone, either to a customer (external audience) or to someone in the company (internal audience). To be successful in selling you need to be able to ask the right questions and then listen carefully to the answer. Questioning is an active skill. But you need to ask the right questions and then listen carefully to the answers. When information is being sought, 'open ended' questions beginning with who, what, when, where, how and why, should be used to get a detailed response. 'Closed or Direct' questions demand a 'yes' or 'no' answer and are valuable where you need confirmation.
But asking the right questions does not count for anything if you do not listen to the answers. Good listeners usually do or do not do the following things:

• Concentrate on what the person is saying
• Cut out distractions
• Allow the customer to continue without interruption
• Do not make assumptions
• Do not anticipate the customer's words and jump in to complete his/her sentence for him/her.
• Encourage customers to continue by showing patience and genuine interest.
• Use active listening phrases and words such as ‘hmmm’ and ‘I see’ to indicate that you wish them to continue.
• Use additional questions, which both reassures the customer and allow you to check your understanding.

Understanding – 'Someone to understand you.....someone who did not try to sell you what you do not want, rather what you needed'. Those who understand the needs, difficulties and feelings of customers are well on the way to achieving a sale. Each customer is unique and calls for different handling. Only by putting yourself in their shoes (call this empathy) and appreciating their point of view can we hope to do this. Understanding the customer means that you:

• Try to find out their needs, problems and feelings
• Are able to select the product/service that is most appropriate to their needs.
• Can concentrate on the benefits they will get
• Avoid talking about things which will not help him/her.
• Use terms that the customers understand.

Handling in-person Communications – Here are some tips of what you can do when communicating with a customer directly:

• Dress professionally
• Maintain a neat, organised, clean, well-stocked work environment
• Use a smile and direct eye contact to demonstrate friendliness and individual interest
• Make customers your first priority
• Greet every customer cordially
• Give the customer your undivided attention
• Listen for key facts, ideas, and feelings, avoid interrupting
• Ensure privacy
• Acknowledge feelings and restate
• Ask questions to gain additional necessary information
• Bring each issue to resolution as quickly as possible; commit to specific actions and reasonable time frames
• Thank the customer and/or offer future assistance

We shall continue with part 2 of Communication skills in next month's issue of TNI's e-Newsletter, covering Writing skills and Giving Instructions Effectively. So look out for it!

INTERESTING ARTICLES THAT MAY HELP YOU IN YOUR DAILY WORK
"STOP WASTING TIME "

Here are some tips on how you can reduce time-wasting activities

Back to Top

In management- speak, a 'comfort zone' is usually a pretty bad place to be - a sign that you're coasting, going through the motions, afraid of a challenge or maybe just quietly going to seed. Somehow being comfortable has become associated with low motivation, even laziness. According to one business website, good managers should spend their time identifying and eliminating these comfort zones. Like having meetings where no one is allowed to sit down, the idea seems to be that if people get too comfortable everything will grind to a halt.

This never made much sense to me. In my own field of shiatsu - the Japanese art of working with pressure points to keep mind, body and energy aligned - it's very important for the practitioner to be as comfortable as possible, otherwise it doesn't really work. Any tension or anxiety I feel can  transmit itself to the client in the same way that a nervous rider transmits their fear to the horse. I never thought much about why this was until a colleague pointed out to me the origin of the word 'comfort'. It comes from medieval French and means - or once meant - 'with strength'. To be comfortable, in other words, really means to be strong, and to be strong is to be comfortable. This related to the medieval code of chivalry, in which a knight's duties went far beyond just showing up for battles. A knight had spiritual, political and social obligations, and his basic duty was to help and protect all those who needed it - a bit like customer service with armour on. The medieval French idea is not so different from the even older Chinese notion that comfort is not just about physical wellbeing - though that is important - but also involves feeling good about yourself emotionally, mentally and spiritually. This kind of all-round comfort creates the strength that makes people believe in you as a leader.

A simple example would be lying in bed with a bad cold on a freezing February morning knowing you have an important meeting that day to secure your company's support for a charity you care passionately about. Physically, the warm bed feels like heaven, but the longer you lie there the more uncomfortable you become at the idea of missing a meeting that really matters. Your spirit says get up, your body says stay in bed, while your mind goes back and forth between the two. Not a comfortable position to be in - more of a 'discomfort zone' in fact. And the truth is that in corporate life it is these discomfort zones that most people inhabit most of the time. A job can be mentally challenging but spiritually a dead end, or financially rewarding but emotionally draining.

The Perfect Fit
On the other hand, an employee who is genuinely comfortable in their job is probably working at their best - they not only have all the skills necessary for it, but they feel a real sense of fulfillment in doing it. And it only takes a few people like this to create a benign atmosphere that supports and inspires colleagues, and customers too. This makes sense because being in your comfort zone makes you a natural leader - naturally able to lead in the many little ways that count for so much in the complexities of modern business, from being generous with time in helping a colleague master some new software, to being patient enough to convince an irate customer that the company really can learn from its mistakes.

The problem from a manager's point of view is that people in discomfort zones get used to them and begin to think of them as normal or just 'the way life is'. Trying to change these entrenched attitudes can drag you well beyond the bounds of your own comfort zones. If this happens to you, the first thing to do is stop! Why? Because the more uncomfortable you get, the less influence you have. Some management training courses specialize in throwing you as far out of your comfort zone as possible, the idea being once you get back into it, it has somehow enlarged itself. This may be true on training courses, but at work - where you are responsible for more than just your own learning - when you're facing a leadership challenge which takes you outside your comfort zone, the most important thing to do is to get back into that zone as fast as you can.

So how do you do this? Start by thinking about your comfort zone literally as a space all around you, a space with every clear boundaries, in which you can truly feel at ease. Now fill this space with energy - an energy which helps you to get as aligned as you can be, not just physically but in mind and spirit too. This is easier than you think. In fact it all comes down to the three B's - breathing, backbone and belly - three basic techniques of energy alignment which are the foundation of any genuine comfort zone. First, take a deep breadth, hold it in for a second, and then let it out slowly. Repeat this three times, imagining that you are filling yourself with strength each time you breathe in. Next, shift your focus to your backbone and imagine it as a hollow straw: each time you breathe in imagine you are drawing energy from the bottom of your spine all the way up your back through the centre of each vertebra, up through your neck and all the way to the top of your head. Do this until you start feeling your spine is longer and more relaxed. Finally, focus on the belly area - holding your abdomen with your hands on top of each other below the belly button, imagine that each breath is bringing energy to your core muscles. Do this until you feel energy begin to drain out of your head and down into your abdomen.

When you've done it, check the boundaries of your comfort zone - they will probably seem a lot bigger than when you began. And when you remember the situation that was pulling you out of your comfort zone in the first place, how does it seem now? Ok, it hasn't been resolved yet, but whether the situation is a relatively small managerial blip or something that measures high on the office Richter scale, the important thing is that you can maintain your sense of strength and comfort as you deal with it.

There are plenty of uncomfortable leaders in business, but they tend to have uncomfortable followers. You can't force yourself, or anyone else, to be comfortable, but you can increase your awareness of the things that make you uncomfortable and remember the three B's. By staying in your comfort zone, you not only avoid giving out signs of weakness, you also avoid handling leadership challenges by excessive striving for strength. The more you lead from your comfort zone, the bigger and more welcoming that space will be, and the more people will want to join you in it. And I hope you're comfortable with that.(Nick Pole is a shiatsu therapist and mind/body coach specializing in complementary health and self-development.)

"HOW TOYOTA STOPPED LISTENING AND LOST ITS WAY"
'Fundamental lessons to be learned from the Toyota debacle'

I have a vision! All the hardship that these employees endure only to make
good linen for us to wear - there has to be better way forward.

That was the basic desire that drove a young Japanese man called Sakichi Toyoda to develop a leadership principle for the manufacturing business that was later used in the service industry. The maxim - genchi genbutsu which means 'go and see for yourself'.
Sakichi Toyoda spent several years of his youth observing workers in the textile industry and studying the way they wove cloth using looming tools and equipment. The physical pain that the workers endured with the loom weaving tools drove him to re-engineer it. He wanted to simplify the workers' efforts in order to produce a good piece of cloth. That was the start of the business principles and philosophies of working we all know today as the 'Toyota Way'.

These principles pushed the Nagoya-based loom maker to ultimately become the world's largest automaker, Toyota, until the dawn of the year 2010. The headlines in many business news today somewhat read: 'The carmaker's president, Akio Toyoda, is set to testify before the US Congress. This is perhaps a welcome report for the folks in Detroit who saw the American automotive carmakers battered to the point of extinction by a once unknown Japanese automakerwhose basic skills were making looms.

The Toyota Way
Kiichiro Toyoda, the founder and grandfather of Akio Toyoda, worked tirelessly to develop people and managerial values, which were the very foundation of the Toyota Way. Behind it was the principle of 'genchi genbutsu', a method of observation and identification: 'muda' (non value-added work), 'muri' (unreasonable work) and 'mura' (unbalanced work) and subsequently, ensuring that a state of continuous improvement and elimination of waste was achieved.

These factors served as the basis to support the existence of the Toyota Way with other principles that were centered on people and their ability to work and produce quality products. The Toyota Way has been evangelized by various management gurus and consultants and inspired dozens of books that spoke of it as the secret weapon of corporate success.
It sparked off a cottage industry called 'Lean Management' and 'Just-In-time Production'. The concept of continuous improvement or 'kaizen' has been so widely used that it is an accepted terminology in business management. The Toyota Production System is a carefully studied business method by companies with ambitions of overtaking larger rivals in the global market, a method that Toyota successfully applied to overtake the Big Three of Detroit.

In the Toyota Production System, the sought-after solutions in many of these make a task simple through which perfection can be achieved. In many ways, the Toyota Production System is a success comparable to the success of Six Sigma, which focused on improving quality and popularized by General Electric under the helm of Jack Welch.

The leaders in these organizations ensured that such business principles and management philosophies were applied throughout the organisation, from the assembly lines to the boardroom.

Losing its way
What led Toyota to lose its way? Perhaps it was the comfort of having reached the pinnacle of the automotive industry or the challenge of staying at the top.
"Pursued growth over the speed of which we were able to develop our people." Consider this recent quote by the current Toyota president as a reflection of the catalyst for the problems faced by Toyota. An organisation built on leadership qualities that encouraged open communication and dialogue between its people about problems, quality and principles as the organisation expectations, had stopped listening. It even stopped responding quickly enough to the voices of industries, customers and employees.

The components synonymous to the Toyota principle are long-term management decisions, highlighting of problems, teamwork and most importantly, a system of self inspection (a self-critical technique of mistake-proofing tasks and activities). These components effectively paved the way to form a culture that fosters continuous improvement through organizational learning.

When Toyoda developed its business principles, it was based on the activities that people were involved in when producing a product or service. People were the foundation and those familiar with the Toyota Way will know that many of these principles developed humility and that it is this humility factor that enabled it to succeed, a quality that is probably lost in the current organisation.

Has Toyota, in its quest to become the world's top automotive manufacturer, ended up embracing the philosophies that its rivals thrived on? Did Toyota lose sight of its goals when it decided to become the world's largest automaker, overtaking General Motors, Ford and Chrysler?
Critics are speculating that Toyota in its strive for perfection in speed, quality and cost, has replaced its core principles with the drive and hunger for profits, growth and status - goals aimed only by business stakeholders with capitalistic principles. Perhaps the tampering of management principles as the organisation reached its pinnacle led Toyota to wander away from its ability to listen to its people and customers. It turned away from its founding principle. The result: It lost its way and ended as an organisation with perhaps the largest and most expensive manufacturing recalls.

It is evident that Toyota had failed to comply with the principle that it had previously practiced for decades. The lesson to be learnt - ignoring the foundation that a business is built on can be a perilous journey.

Rediscovering Toyoda
When Toyoda christened Toyota in 1937, a set of principles that guided how the business would operate was established. It was built on the foundation of people and its leaders with 'respect for people' and continuous improvement' being its twin pillars. These pillars also summarise the company's values and conduct. The inability to develop people within the organisation to match the speed of its growth is quite likely the reason Toyota lost its way.

In order to ensure that the crisis it found itself in is not wasted, it is likely that Akio Toyoda and the organisation will return to the steadfast principles the company was founded on. The Toyota Way, as applied in many of the carmaker's assembly plants, is to press the reset button when a defect is identified. The company's culture of humble leadership will steer the organisation back tom its foundation - its people and the practices. In this way, Toyota will pick itself up and regain its global standing. It will be a process of rediscovery for the automaker.(By Dr. Arul)

• TNI has been in this business since late 1999, and has grown to be one of the leading training providers in town.
• TNI specializes in In-House training as they are able to customize the training according to the needs of the client(s). However public courses are also available on request, as many small companies (and even the larger ones) are usually unable to release all their staff for training at the same time.
• For those interested to know more about TNI you may contact us as follows:-

*******************************************************************************************************************

See below for the write-up.